Our understanding of Anglo-American war poetry remains limited to a few British voices speaking from Great War trenches. In contrast, this project develops a transatlantic genealogy of the modern war poet through comparative close readings of British and American poetry from three different conflicts, World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War. It argues that the shattered body on the battlefield forces itself upon, competes with, and disturbs poetic voice. The wartime corpse so infects poetic voice that the modern war poet, a persona first conceived by Whitman in the American Civil War, shapes his or her voice out of the bodies of the dead. The soldier's corpse serves as a site of significant epistemological and political struggle, and fixing it with meaning, or protesting others' signification of it, provides a primary impetus for wartime verse. Poetic representations of the wartime dead, therefore, provide important indices of cultural meaning and unique insights into a society's attitudes toward war, death, and the body, as well as toward the responsibility of the poet in times of officially sanctioned violence.

Initially the term war poet was used to label a profusion of amateur British voices patriotically singing their soldiers off to the trenches of France. Although generally dismissed as unrealistic and escapist, popular WWI poetry shows an obsession with death that reflects deep anxieties about the war and the course of modernization. Around 1930 these largely consolatory visions of the apotheosized dead were replaced by a younger generation of “trench” poets who opened their voice to the corpse, allowing it to speak its strange truth in an imagistic and onomatopoeic language through them. The WWII poets developed this corpse voice around an absent but symbolically resonant corpse, which reflected an outlook that was more philosophically resigned to warfare even as it was politically astute. American poets of the Vietnam era returned to the stark poetic of the WWI trench poets, but increasingly turned their gaze from the soldier's cadaver to the Vietnamese prostitute's corpse-like body, which they used as an expansive symbol of America's imperial policies in Southeast Asia.